Since culture shapes the behavior of individuals

(Boddewyn 1992, Toyne and Walters 1988, Dunning 1992). Since culture shapes the behavior of individuals, marketing has focused attention primarily on the area of the influence of culture on consumer behavior (Engel, Blackwell and Miniard 1990, Kahle, Beatty and Homer 1986).Management has been examining how culture affects the decision-making process and the formulation of strategy (Hambrick and Mason 1984, Clark 1990). Since organizations may be considered as groups of individuals, cultural phenomena also are found in firms (Adler 1986), and the concept of "organizational culture" has been addressed by organizational behavior scholars like Shein (1985), and Smircich (1983). In summary, culture appears to be a powerful construct in the social sciences, related to learned behavior of individuals in groups. In addition, it seems that culture is responsible for differences in behavior between people from different cultural groups, and appears to be a contributing factor in explaining business phenomena. Since culture is a group phenomenon, it may appear in many different levels of peoples' groupings, countries, regions, towns, villages, or even districts, forming the concept of subculture which is presented in the next section.

This preview has intentionally blurred sections.
Sign up to view the full version.

QUESTIONS FOR CASE DISCUSSION1)How could you best summarize the definition of culture?2)Although the article presents culture as stable over time, what is your personal perception regarding this characteristic? Nowadays do people behave the same way they behaved 20-30 years ago? If not, can we still say that people from different countries (cultures) behave differently?3)Which fields of business do we apply cultural concepts and why?4)Please provide an example of culture application in business (preferably from your personal experience).

This is the end of the preview.
Sign up
to
access the rest of the document.

What students are saying

As a current student on this bumpy collegiate pathway, I stumbled upon Course Hero, where I can find study resources for nearly all my courses, get online help from tutors 24/7, and even share my old projects, papers, and lecture notes with other students.

Kiran
Temple University Fox School of Business ‘17, Course Hero Intern

I cannot even describe how much Course Hero helped me this summer. It’s truly become something I can always rely on and help me. In the end, I was not only able to survive summer classes, but I was able to thrive thanks to Course Hero.

Dana
University of Pennsylvania ‘17, Course Hero Intern

The ability to access any university’s resources through Course Hero proved invaluable in my case. I was behind on Tulane coursework and actually used UCLA’s materials to help me move forward and get everything together on time.